Emergence, is an electronic music performance that explores an alternative form of spatialization, in an engaging concept, where the audience's smartphones become co-creators of the work via a live stream of sound and appear as sound-creating objects in the room.

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When the composer Julie Østengaard sends sound out to the audience's smartphones, the playbacks on the phones occur with temporal shifts - this creates waves of sound through the room and complex, partially unpredictable wholes of rhythmic and harmonic layers that merge.

 

The work is also inspired by the natural phenomenon "emergence", which, among other things, found in black sun, in ant colonies and motor traffic. Here a complexity arises out of simplicity, a kind of macro characteristic of behavior that arises spontaneously from many interacting micro parts. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts - much like the whole that arises from the staggered doublings of telephone playbacks.

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With that starting point, Julie Østengaard works compositionally with "micro parts" or fragments of sound material, which form spontaneous interacting behavior - much like the emergence phenomenon.

When the work is performed, the fragmented components of sound are assembled into a whole in the room via the phone playbacks and the work therefore becomes unique for each performance.

In interaction with the smartphone playbacks, the work will be complimented by a sound page, performed on a quadrophonic speaker system.

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Performed at Göteborg Art Sounds Festival, Experimental Music Expo 2022

Mayhem CPH 2022

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Supported by

The Danish Composers Society

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Technical support

Frederik Tollund